The integrated management plan for the coastal zone of Brunei Darussalam

Coastal zone management, Resource management, Brunei Darussalam,

Implementation of ecologically sustainable development by Commonwealth departments and agencies

On 24 August 1998 the Treasurer referred the implementation of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) by Commonwealth departments and agencies to the Commission for inquiry and report within nine months of receipt of the reference.ecologically sustainable development - environment - ESD - policy development - whole of government - forest - fisheries - resources - greenhouse - biodiversity - environment protection - environmental management - land - water - questionnaire

Overcoming: A Theory of Accelerated Second-Degree Baccalaureate Graduate Nurse Transition to Professional Nursing Practice.

A plethora of stressors are known to be related to the process of transition to professional nursing practice as the neophyte registered nurse (RN) transitions from student to professional nurse. Although not new, accelerated second-degree baccalaureate nursing (ASDBN) programs have opened in record numbers in recent years in the wake of the current nursing shortage. Little is known about the experience of professional practice for accelerated second-degree baccalaureate graduate nurses (ASDBGNs). The stressful graduate nurse transition, current nursing shortage, and lack of an empirical base for ASDBN programs illustrate the significance of the research problem. This modified grounded theory study generated a substantive Theory of Overcoming: ASDBGN Transition to Professional Nursing Practice. Constant comparative method of joint data collection, analysis, theoretical sampling, and memoing was used. Data were collected through semistructured interviews using open-ended questions that were conducted over the telephone or in person. The identified basic social process (BSP), overcoming, encompasses 5 stages: reality check, goaling, getting started, coming out on top, and mastering. Study findings provide a beginning evidence-base for nursing education, policy, and clinical practice related to this growing student population

Bridges, brokers and boundary spanners in collaborative networks: a systematic review

BackgroundBridges, brokers and boundary spanners facilitate transactions and the flow of information between people or groups who either have no physical or cognitive access to one another, or alternatively, who have no basis on which to trust each other. The health care sector is a context that is rich in isolated clusters, such as silos and professional “tribes,” in need of connectivity. It is a key challenge in health service management to understand, analyse and exploit the role of key agents who have the capacity to connect disparate groupings in larger systems. MethodsThe empirical, peer reviewed, network theory literature on brokerage roles was reviewed for the years 1994 to 2011 following PRISMA guidelines. ResultsThe 24 articles that made up the final literature set were from a wide range of settings and contexts not just healthcare. Methods of data collection, analysis, and the ways in which brokers were identified varied greatly. We found four main themes addressed in the literature: identifying brokers and brokerage opportunities, generation and integration of innovation, knowledge brokerage, and trust. The benefits as well as the costs of brokerage roles were examined. ConclusionsCollaborative networks by definition, seek to bring disparate groups together so that they can work effectively and synergistically together. Brokers can support the controlled transfer of specialised knowledge between groups, increase cooperation by liaising with people from both sides of the gap, and improve efficiency by introducing “good ideas” from one isolated setting into another. There are significant costs to brokerage. Densely linked networks are more efficient at diffusing information to all their members when compared to sparsely linked groups. This means that while a bridge across a structural hole allows information to reach actors that were previously isolated, it is not the most efficient way to transfer information. Brokers who become the holders of, or the gatekeepers to, specialised knowledge or resources can become overwhelmed by the role and so need support in order to function optimally

Partial aggregation for collective communication in distributed memory machines

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems interconnect a large number of Processing Elements (PEs) in high-bandwidth networks to simulate complex scientific problems. The increasing scale of HPC systems poses great challenges on algorithm designers. As the average distance between PEs increases, data movement across hierarchical memory subsystems introduces high latency. Minimizing latency is particularly challenging in collective communications, where many PEs may interact in complex communication patterns. Although collective communications can be optimized for network-level parallelism, occasional synchronization delays due to dependencies in the communication pattern degrade application performance. To reduce the performance impact of communication and synchronization costs, parallel algorithms are designed with sophisticated latency hiding techniques. The principle is to interleave computation with asynchronous communication, which increases the overall occupancy of compute cores. However, collective communication primitives abstract parallelism which limits the integration of latency hiding techniques. Approaches to work around these limitations either modify the algorithmic structure of application codes, or replace collective primitives with verbose low-level communication calls. While these approaches give fine-grained control for latency hiding, implementing collective communication algorithms is challenging and requires expertise knowledge about HPC network topologies. A collective communication pattern is commonly described as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) where a set of PEs, represented as vertices, resolve data dependencies through communication along the edges. Our approach improves latency hiding in collective communication through partial aggregation. Based on mathematical rules of binary operations and homomorphism, we expose data parallelism in a respective DAG to overlap computation with communication. The proposed concepts are implemented and evaluated with a subset of collective primitives in the Message Passing Interface (MPI), an established communication standard in scientific computing. An experimental analysis with communication-bound microbenchmarks shows considerable performance benefits for the evaluated collective primitives. A detailed case study with a large-scale distributed sort algorithm demonstrates, how partial aggregation significantly improves performance in data-intensive scenarios. Besides better latency hiding capabilities with collective communication primitives, our approach enables further optimizations of their implementations within MPI libraries. The vast amount of asynchronous programming models, which are actively studied in the HPC community, benefit from partial aggregation in collective communication patterns. Future work can utilize partial aggregation to improve the interaction of MPI collectives with acclerator architectures, and to design more efficient communication algorithms